The Dammed - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 156

conservationists, led by President Theodore Roosevelt, who believed that man should
maximize the use of natural resources over the long term. At congressional hearings,
Gifford Pinchot , the first chief of the US Forest Service and a staunch conservationist,
argued in favor of the reservoir on the grounds that natural resources would best be
served by careful management. But Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, led the opposition
with the famous cry “Dam Hetch Hetchy!”
The battle seesawed, but Hetch Hetchy was finally approved by President Woodrow
Wilson in 1913, and the O'Shaughnessy Dam was completed a decade later. Today
Hetch Hetchy Reservoir provides 85 percent of San Francisco's water, which comes from
the Tuolumne River and, like New York's, is so clean it does not have to be filtered.
But the reservoir has remained a lightning rod . In 2010, groups such as Restore Hetch
Hetchy declared that the dam was an environmentally destructive nineteenth-century
boondoggle and agitated for a ballot measure to remove it; the water from the reser-
voir, the group said, could be replaced by water from a restored groundwater basin and
aggressive recycling. The city countered that tearing down Hetch Hetchy would be ex-
pensive and polluting and maintained that the existing system is “one of the greenest
systems around.”
• • •
In the American West, a cadre of engineers and bureaucrats known as Water Buffaloes
enjoyed a golden age of dam, reservoir, and aqueduct building that lasted from the De-
pression through the late 1970s. Water Buffaloes tend to speak in telegraphic bursts
studded with acronyms—IID (Imperial Irrigation District), MAF (millions of acre-feet
of water), CVP (the federal Central Valley Project). They wax lyrical about spigots,
pumps, and pipes. They love nothing more than to blast rock apart and erect giant “wa-
ter storage structures.”
Water Buffaloes are synonymous with the US Bureau of Reclamation , also known as
the Bureau of Rec, or just the Bureau. It is one of ten divisions within the Department
of the Interior (DOI), which was established in 1849 to manage, preserve, and develop
natural resources and public lands across the country. The Bureau of Rec was founded
by the Reclamation Act of 1902, to “reclaim” land—i.e., to establish reliable water sup-
plies and counter desertification; to drain swamps and restrain water with dikes and
levees to make new land available for housing or farming; to build and manage enorm-
ous irrigation projects; and to help resettle people across the seventeen Western states.
In its first decade, the Bureau was focused on creating reservoirs and canals designed
to improve agricultural irrigation. By the 1930s, it had expanded its portfolio to include
flood-control and municipal water projects and had become a major provider of hydro-
electric power. Since then, it has branched into industrial water supply, water quality